A Bloodsmoor Romance [Paperback]

Joyce Carol Oates (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Warner Books (September 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446308250
• ISBN-13: 978-0446308250
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #903,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 19 C feminism in a funny, surprising Cinderella story, July 19, 2002

By 

R. Tiedemann "Sunnye" (Bellevue, NE USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Bloodsmoor Romance (Paperback)

It's popular in some circles to turn up noses at "romance" novels. If you're in one of those, don't turn up your nose at this one! In it Oates has captured the style of the 19th Century Gothic Romance novel down the the last crossed t and dotted i. It's also a beautifully researched picture of how women lived in the late-1800s, written in the language of the time -- or at least a very good simulation of it. 20th century feminism in 19th century guise.

It's about women's roles in society and the rules they lived by. A fast-moving tale full of imaginative twists -- there's a wedding night scene that's the funniest and the most surprising I've read.

The story begins with the introduction to a surly Cinderella-type with step sisters who definitely are not Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. It's September, 1879. All five girls are spoiled and privileged, living lives of ease in the white-columned splendor of Kiddemaster Hall, near the Bloodsmoor River in Pennsylvania.

The girls are relaxing in the gazebo after a grueling party. Deirdre (did they really name girls Deirdre in those days?), who is our Cinderella, becomes angry and stalks down the path to the river. Suddenly a giant black balloon dips from the sky and carries her away. The book describes the fates of the girls for the next 20 years in rich and lively prose.

Oates takes the romance novel and skewers it with social satire. Her volume of work is prodigious -- she has probably written more in a wider variety of style and genres than any other contemporary author. Whether romance, horror, science fiction, mainstream, mystery, short story collection, essays, criticism or poetry, her work excels. Joyce Carol Oates is the Renaissance Woman on the modern American literary scene and A BLOODSMOOR ROMANCE eclipses the genre.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bloodsmoor Romance : A critique of the conditions of women in the nineteenth century, February 16, 2006

By 

Sameh Abdel-Galil "Samehgalil" (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Bloodsmoor Romance (Paperback)

Taken at its face value, A Bloodsmoor Romance can be looked upon as a domestic romance where issues relating to marriage and securing husbands upon the part of the female species populating the novel occupy centre stage. However, events over the course of "600 pages of anti-romance" prove that there is more to the novel than being a mere replica of Austin's Pride and Prejudice or Suzan Warner's The Wide Wide World. Faithful to the romantic conventions, the novel introduces five marriageable girls but unlike a typical romance three of these five girls spurn marriage "... in their frenzied quest for their own fortunes in the wide world". Far from being "a reiteration of a more or less euphoric or depressed romanticism" (Women's time, Kristeva 43), A Bloodsmoor Romance is more of a critique of the conditions of women in the nineteenth century, conditions Oates sees lingering and spiraling into the modern day. Only the instruments of oppression are different this time.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent take on the Victorian genre, December 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Bloodsmoor Romance (Hardcover)

The cover looked like a melodramatic grocery-store romance novel--it had a woman with billowing black hair and a breathtaken expression, wearing an extravagant 19th-century dress--and the back read, "One beauteous autumn day in 1879, a sinister black balloon swooped from the skies and abducted Miss Deirdre Zinn as her four sisters gaped, mute and terror-struck. For their family nothing was ever the same again..." If I hadn't known it was a parody, I would have been terribly alarmed and probably would have put it back on the shelves. But, having been notified of the fact, I laughed, and decided I had to read it. "Like a long Edward Gorey cartoon, or like Little Women as told by Stephen King," said one review in the front. Yes. It was just my sort of thing. Altogether, Ms. Oates captures the spirit of the times quite well, deftly mixing mentions of Edison and Walt Whitman and Poe into her characters' social lives, and including an intimate personal appearance by Mark Twain. Furthermore, as this book is highly amusing and deeply interesting, and barely at all disturbing, it shows that Joyce Carol Oates is an even more versatile author than I realized. Fans of Victorian literature will be delighted at this new take on the subject.